When I heard that University of Maryland law school professor Sherrilyn Ifill had taken the reins of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, I was deep into the reading a new book about the early life of Thurgood Marshall.

A brilliant civil rights lawyer, who founded the fund and later became the first black on the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall orchestrated the legal battle that desegregated Maryland's law school, whose library now bears his name. Had it not been for Marshall's victory in the Maryland case -- the first in the nation to force the integration of a white law school -- the legal career that has propelled Ifill to the top ranks of the fight for racial justice might never have happened.

And that would have been this nation's loss.

At 50, Ifill is no throwback to the NAACP fund's glorious past. As much as she knows the lingering vestiges of the Jim Crow-era, she understands the racial subtleties of the time in which we live -- a faux post-racial era. "There are substantive challenges that relate to the ongoing issues that so many African Americans face," she told me during a telephone interview. She's talking about the disparities in the criminal justice system, and the barriers to education and economic opportunities that despite decades of effort have yet to be overcome. "Progress has been made," she said, "but sometimes people allow the progress to blind them to the reality of the ongoing challenges."

The progress that Marshall ushered in when he got Donald Murray admitted into Maryland's law school in 1936 is recounted in Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, which was written by Larry Gibson, Ifill's colleague on Maryland's law school faculty.

Gibson's book chronicles the early years of Marshall's life in telling detail, a time when this nation's struggles with its racial demons was widely acknowledged -- if not accepted.

Ifill takes the helm of NAACP fund amid growing evidence that a lot of people think the struggle for racial equality was won with the election of this nation's first black president. But Ifill said "talk of a post-racial era is a huge rhetorical device that someone came up with during Barack Obama's ascendancy into the White House. While that is a great sign of change, being able to see one highly educated, super-qualified black man in the Oval Office is not the same as suggesting that all African Americans are accepted in the same way."

In fact, there is mounting proof to the contrary.

In professional football which, on paper at least, has a strong commitment to diversity, racial barriers seem to be re-emerging. Since the end of the regular season, all 15 of the sport's top vacancies (general mangers and coaching positions) have been filled by whites. At the University of Pennsylvania, where President Amy Gutmann is thought to be a national leader in diversity, black faculty members are protesting her failure to name a single black dean among the 12 she appointed over the past nine years. And even President Obama has just one black in his 15-member Cabinet. That's three fewer than George W. Bush, the compassionate conservative Republican, had in his Cabinet.

Add to this friendly fire the new legal assaults on affirmative action and the voter suppression campaign launched by right-wing enemies of civil rights, and the job Ifill takes on is even more daunting.

In Gibson's book, Marshall is shown to be a man tenaciously focused on using the courts to uplift his race. He had little tolerance for those who put their personal or political interests ahead of the good causes he waged for disadvantaged people. Ifill would do well to follow his lead.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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